T
he hawker question is central to the debates over public However, the official illegality of unlicensed hawkers does not
space in Mumbai. Since the late 1990s, elite NGOs and preclude other forms of recognition by the state. The unlicensed
residents’ associations have been actively promoting, with hawkers, although officially outside the purview of the law, have
some success, the idea that hawkers are to be blamed for many frequent, if not daily, interactions with a wide range of repre-
of the city’s problems. To them, hawkers are “a symbol of a sentatives of the state, including police constables, the
metropolitan space gone out of control” [Rajagopal 2001:94]; Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) staff and the
a “menace” who inappropriately use streets and footpaths, block regional transport office (RTO) authorities profoundly shaping
traffic, depress real estate values and are, more generally, eye- hawkers’ everyday experiences.
sores that prevent Mumbai from being a “world-class” city. This Violent actions against hawkers by police and BMC are not
despite the fact that street hawking has had a long historical a new phenomenon in Mumbai. A violent demolition drive in
presence in Mumbai, provides essential services to most of the the early 1980s led the Bombay Hawkers’ Union to file a case
population and provides direct employment for over three lakh in the Bombay High Court against the BMC. The hawkers’ unions
people, in addition to indirectly employing hundreds of thousands argued about the unconstitutionality of what they claimed to be
more [Bhowmik 2003]. Their essential and at the same time arbitrary BMC demolition actions and refusals to issue new
contentious presence on the streets requires a critical engagement licences. The BMC defended their actions, citing sections 312,
with the function of public space and the role of street hawkers 313 and 314 of the 1888 BMC Act, which give BMC the power
in future plans for the city. to remove encroachments on streets and footpaths and to do so
In order to understand the functioning of public space in without warning. Concurrently, the petitioners in the Olga Tellis
Mumbai, it is necessary to understand what hawkers actually do vs BMC case (on the matter of slum demolitions) argued that
in that space, and how they conceptualise their own relationship the 1888 BMC Act contradicts Articles 19 and 21 of the Con-
to it. This is important because several parties involved in the stitution, which grant citizens the right to livelihood. In what has
debates over hawkers operate with a limited understanding of become a much-cited judgment, the Supreme Court upheld the
their work, their daily interactions with the state and the visions BMC’s right to remove encroachments, while also declaring that
hawkers themselves have of a vibrant, democratic and well- the Constitution not only provides a right to life, but a right to
functioning city. In an attempt to address this problem, this paper livelihood. Moreover, the Supreme Court added in a 1989 judg-
provides an account of the situation of hawkers in Mumbai, ment regarding a public interest litigation (PIL) filed on behalf
drawing from field research conducted from June 2004 to Sep- of an evicted hawker in Delhi against the Delhi Municipal
tember 2004 and from June 2005 to March 2006 with unlicensed Corporation [Bhowmik 2003]:
street hawkers in Mumbai. It is also based on the interviews and The right to carry on trade of business mentioned in Article 19(1)(g)
informal conversations conducted with the activists working with of the Constitution, on street pavements, if properly regulated
Mumbai’s elite NGOs (often referred to as “citizens’ groups”) cannot be denied on the ground that the streets are meant exclu-
and residents’ associations, as well as the statements made by sively for passing or re-passing and for no other use. Proper
them at public meetings. Demonstrating the complexity of hawkers’ regulation is, however, a necessary condition as otherwise the very
daily lives and their interactions with the state will hopefully elicit object of laying out roads – to facilitate traffic – may be defeated
new ways of thinking about the place of hawkers in Mumbai’s (Sodhan Singh vs NDMC, 1989).
future. By the “proper regulation”, the court refers to a system of
hawking and non-hawking zones, something that the BMC was
Hawkers and the Law instructed to establish as early as 1985. The final judgment of
the 1985 case included the text of a BMC commissioner’s 1983
No new hawking licences have been issued in Mumbai since letter to the court suggesting hawker regulations. Although
1978, although, along with the larger population, the number of presented as suggestions at the time of the 1985 case, this list
hawkers in the city has increased since that time. Thus it is has since become the basis on which later rules on hawking have
estimated that licensed hawkers now account for less than 10 been written, including the restrictions and conditions on hawking
per cent of the total number of hawkers in the city. The other as well as the Bombay High Court judgments 2003. According
90 per cent of hawkers are, in the eyes of the state, illegal. to this list, cooking food on streets should be prohibited, as well